tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41423582009-05-17T17:06:09.225ZMy day-day technical notes and chat.Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.comBlogger78125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-6894125969019230822009-05-17T16:31:00.004Z2009-05-17T17:06:09.234Z

After the grand experiment described below I ported a large number of the smoke tests over, these happily ran on my Mac under both Safari and Firefox 3.Of course despite my bias for OSX/Linux apparently one or two internet users still use IE. So we probably need to test on that "other" platform too.To do this I setup three VirtualBox instances, running IE6/7/8 respectively. I then modified our

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-39901826206157256122009-05-13T19:36:00.003Z2009-05-13T19:47:49.305Z

For a while I have been doing ad hoc runtime smoke testing of deployments with tools like Selenium. i.e. running a set of simple tests that exercise a series of pre-defined application points. The scripts where typically recorded using the excellent Selenium IDE then replayed through ant/Junit on one or more target browser platforms.Not full regression testing but a start - right? Well these

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-17891328591505951852009-02-07T20:12:00.002Z2009-02-07T20:16:31.320Z

I've been testing a new site with Selenium. Part of this work was on my Mac and in addition to running the tests in Firefox, I wanted to use Safari too. Whenever I launched the test case the first driver window opened, but the content window didn't ever appear. No errors, no fuss, it just didn't happen.After walking away from the problem for a while, the penny finally dropped........Safari blocks

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-25623245830121001322009-01-28T14:33:00.002Z2009-01-28T14:36:41.228Z

If you need to enforce certain patterns in commit messages for svn (eg. ticket nos etc) create a script in ~repos/hooks/pre-commit :REPOS="$1"TXN="$2"# Make sure that the log message contains some text of form Feedback nnnnn:SVNLOOK=/usr/local/bin/svnlookmatch=`$SVNLOOK log -t "$TXN" "$REPOS" | grep -i 'feedback.*[0-9]:'| wc -c`if [ $match -eq 0 ]then echo "COMMIT HAS FAILED:Log message

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-23167948183204247662009-01-15T12:20:00.004Z2009-01-15T12:40:40.544Z

After installing most recent Apache on our Solaris 10 box we got a lot of errors with the default config for listening on SSL. Many many lines like :(128)Network is unreachable: connect to listener on [::]:443Basically on Solaris Listen 443 doesn't hack it anymore. If you want to listen on all interfaces use :Listen 0.0.0.0:443

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-79228386462846752712009-01-15T12:11:00.002Z2009-01-15T12:17:29.028Z

We have had a very odd issue with IE7 being sent pdf files over https. Standard headers that look like this :Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidateContent-Disposition: attachment;filename=mysecretpdffile.pdfContent-Type: application/pdfContent-Length: 19180Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100Connection: Keep-AliveWork fine under IE 5/5.5/6, Opera, Safari et al, but IE 7 reports that the content is

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-40441319001047964652008-11-11T09:37:00.001Z2008-11-11T09:38:34.996Z

I'm kind of an old school command line hacker, but I've got to face up to the fact that the rest of the world seems to be moving on from the ksh. As such my previous super powers for editing command histories with vi commands (esc-k, /, etc) are going to have to be retired. As the rest of the planet has embraced bash, I've found myself struggling with the fact that crtl-r only lets me get the

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-26241864995702030402008-07-28T21:13:00.005Z2008-10-09T08:31:51.831Z

I needed to migrate a chunk of data from an example Derby database up to Oracle 10g today. I found a minor issue with the Hibernate mappings that I was creating. In Derby I could happily have double columns, and these needed to be converted to binary_double columns in Oracle.However I kept having issues with the schema validation in hibernate :Wrong column type: binary_double, expected: double

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-67204510621514852162008-03-10T17:27:00.001Z2008-03-10T17:28:52.944Z

I always seem to forget this :Edit the eclipse.ini in the Application package, not the one in the install dir.

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-17239672924842436452008-03-06T11:49:00.003Z2008-03-08T20:38:22.500Z

I've had a problem with upgrading Parallels the excellent tool for running VMs in OSX. For some reason that I could not initially spot the install would hang in the preflight check before applying all the files. I also had a similar problem trying to force an uninstall.To cut a long story short it appears that the install/uninstall scripts try to shut down the InternetSharing and bootpd daemons..

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-26531035107181191402008-02-28T09:48:00.002Z2008-02-28T09:54:11.795Z

I got frustrated with spaces on Leopard because moving windows around between active spaces didn't seem easy. Turns out it is - all you need to do is click on the menu bar for the window you want moved and then use CTL-LeftArrow/RightArrow to move the window to another space.

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-73584269169927040282007-11-14T08:52:00.000Z2007-11-15T11:50:42.196Z

One of the projects I work on has a reasonable number of JUnit 3 tests (2500). We also use Cruise Control to automate the build cycle. Each package has a suite which defines all the tests to be run, but this has become more and more error prone over time. Developers forget to add tests to the suites, leaving orphaned tests etc.The obvious solution is to use the batchtest mechanism provided in

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-71576648317303724772007-05-28T18:05:00.001Z2007-05-28T19:05:12.545Z

As well as using JChav as part of our deployment cycle, I have additionally been using it to monitor some production servers. For the production servers you obviously don't run them at any load that is likely to affect the real users. However 1 thread running a set of tests once an hour (thanks to cron) can give a good view of performance over time. I am fully aware of other software that can be

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-26023301218532676882007-05-17T19:44:00.000Z2007-05-17T19:45:02.462Z

After an interesting JavaOne session on GWT, I thought I would have a quick play with the toolkit. I hit a little roadblock initially which after discussions with other colleagues they had problems with too.In the Getting Started guide the section on building an Eclipse project skips one step that caught me out. Do not create the project in your Eclipse workspace, instead perform the two steps in

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-1165158816629345322006-12-03T15:02:00.000Z2006-12-03T15:13:36.640Z

My formative education was all shell based, and its a tough habbit for an old timer like me to break. I've never quite got on with screens so was delighted to find Terminator.Terminator is a java application that provides a fast responsive terminal with additional features like searching. However the killer feature for me is tabbed terminals, this is going to save me so much desktop realestate!

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-1160422842564793372006-10-09T19:25:00.000Z2006-10-10T18:01:47.276Z

I've been working on JChav with a couple of colleagues. It allows you to take the output generated by JMeter and track performance over time.The general idea is that you build a JMeter script that gets run from ant. So after every automated build/deploy the ant task generates an XML file showing the performance for that build.The JChav ant task then operates on the stored XML files to produce a

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-1159034059054499792006-09-23T17:51:00.000Z2006-09-23T18:00:03.190Z

IntroductionSelenium RC provides an excellent framework for automating UI tests. The issue that we have had with this approach in the past is that we have struggled to automate the use of these tools as no single platform can run the full set of browsers we need for our regression testing.I missed the google London Test Automation conference but google video has an excellent presentation by Jason

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-1157282023930473462006-09-03T10:46:00.000Z2006-09-03T11:17:59.386Z

I switched back in April and I thought I should share some of the software I'm now using on a daily basis.Non CommercialSmultron is a fantastic little text editor. It supports multiple open files, syntax highlighting etc etc.Shrook is a nice RSS feed aggregator, with a simple well thought out GUI.NeoOffice is an Aqua port of Open Office.Mail Scripts whilst not something I use every day I'm

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-1156780474948104152006-08-28T15:00:00.001Z2008-12-11T13:00:19.683Z

I needed a simple encrypted partition for some my Mac laptop. After a bit of searching around, I realised that this is actually a built in feature in OSX. To create/use an encrypted partition perform the following steps :Applications/Utilitylaunch Disk UtilitySelect New ImageGive the image a name, size and select AES for encryption.Then set a password for the disk. Make sure you do not select the

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-1145200690865079282006-04-16T15:04:00.000Z2006-04-16T16:10:45.956Z

Trying to keep up with the football this afternoon showed up a little problem listening to RealPlayer streams on the Intel version of OS X.Bottom line is that RealPlayer is not yet a universal binary. So although it runs fine stand alone it doesn't support being embedded in a universal binary.i.e. because Safari and Firefox 1.5.0.2 are in universal format, they cannot embed plugins that are

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-1145130634925853492006-04-15T19:28:00.000Z2006-04-15T19:50:34.936Z

hmmm non for months then two in a day......I struggled to find a binary copy of mod_jk to link Apache and JBoss over AJP. Quick summary for anyone else needing to play this game :a) Snag the code from jakarta.apache.orgb) ./configure -with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxsc) copy the resultin mod_jk.so to /usr/libexec/httpdd) edit httpd.conf in /private/etc/httpd/ to add LoadModule jk_module libexec

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-1145096330518968692006-04-15T09:58:00.000Z2006-04-15T19:27:40.726Z

I've been suffering Mac envy in OS/hardware terms for a long time. The problem has been that nagging doubt in the back of my head that says that there will be one requirement that I can't solve without windows (vpn being the main issue up until now). Well once Apple announced Boot Camp I realised that excuse had vanished. The only remaining one was around video games and the XBox 360 is already

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-1135773708265367342005-12-28T12:24:00.000Z2005-12-28T12:42:01.016Z

Earlier this month I found a minor problem with how JBoss AS deals with web service handlers returning false. It looked like a bug as I could reproduce it on both JBoss 4.0.2 and JBoss 4.0.3RC1 so I dropped a note onto the forum.I got a quick professional response agreeing that it looked like a bug, and was requested to produce a simple ear that demonstrated the fault. It was a busy day at work,

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-1129024452530671542005-10-11T07:52:00.000Z2005-12-12T11:37:24.233Z

Ah my extremely battered P900 only has a few more months to struggle on.Specs include wifi :)11/12/05Excellent review here although it looks like we will be waiting until at least March.

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142358.post-1120592604903039202005-07-05T19:28:00.000Z2005-07-05T19:56:43.606Z

As promised an update after spending a week with Skype in the field.I've just returned from a week at JavaOne and used nothing else for calls.The overall summary is that it was excellent, I made around 3 hours of Skype-Skype calls, and about two hours of SkypeOut to landlines in Europe. Both where excellent, most where made from wireless connections with speeds around 2-5Mbs. The only time I had

Paulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03128751854785304048noreply@blogger.com0